Office XP: Product Activation Gone Berserk, Part 2

In an earlier entry, I described the terrors of trying to get the Office XP preview to run on my Windows XP system. After ordering a second copy of the corporate preview, I'm still out of luck.

Even after a clean install of Windows XP, and installing Office XP with the new product key, Office XP still insists that it needs to be reactivated every time it starts. There's no support for the Office XP preview, but in theory, if I buy Office XP when it hits the shelves, I'll be able to call someone up and sort this out if it still happens with the final version.

I am hoping that the Microsoft support rep doesn't simply tell me "Sorry, according to our database, you've cursed your computer by trying to activate Office XP too many times. You will have to replace your computer with one that isn't cursed."

Maybe my computer's not cursed - maybe the combination of Office XP and Windows XP is not a good one. After all, they are both betas. I tried installing the corporate preview on spare system, one that was running Windows 2000. So perhaps it's just a bad mixture of betas. Or perhaps the spare system doesn't have the curse...

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